The Throat (60 page)

The houses
with their nameplates, huge mailboxes, and neat lawns faced the narrow
streets bluntly, like the tenements along Horatio Street. They might
have been as empty as the tenements. The garage doors had been sealed
tight to the asphalt driveways by remote control. Ours was the only car
in sight. Ransom and I could have been the only people in Elm Hill. "Do
you really know where you're going?" This, the first sentence Ransom
had spoken since inviting me to waste his gasoline, was a grudging
snarl directed to the side window. His entire upper body was twisted to
rest his head on his right shoulder.

"This is
their street," I said.

"Everything
looks alike." He had transferred his anger to our surroundings. Of
course, he was correct: all the streets in Elm Hill did look very much
alike.

"I hate these
brain-dead toytowns." A second later: "They put their names on those
signs so they can come home to the right house at night." After another
pause: "You know what I object to about all this? It's so tacky."

"I'll drive
you home and come back by myself," I said, and he shut up.

From the end
of the block, the house looked almost undamaged. A woman in jeans and a
gray sweatshirt was shoving a cardboard box into the rear of an old
blue Volvo station wagon drawn up onto the rutted tracks to the garage.
A tall, curved lamp ending in a round white bubble stood on the grass
behind her. Her short white hair gleamed in the sun.

I pulled the
Pontiac onto the tracks and parked behind the Volvo. John pushed the
Colt under his seat. The woman moved away from the station wagon and
glanced at the house before coming toward us. When I got out of the
car, she gave me a shy, almost rueful smile. She thought we were from
the fire department or the insurance company, and she gestured at her
house. "Well, there it is." A light, vaguely European accent tugged at
her voice. "It wouldn't have been so bad, except the explosion buckled
the floor all the way into the bedroom."

The
prettiness her old neighbors had mentioned was still visible in her
round face, clean of makeup, beneath the thick cap of white hair. A
streak of black ash smudged her chin. She wiped her hands on her jeans
and stepped forward to take my hand in a light, firm handshake. "The
whole thing was pretty scary, but we're doing all right."

A thin man
with an angular face and a corona of graying hair came off the porch
with a heap of folded clothes in his arms. He said he'd be right with
us and went to the back of the Volvo and pushed the pile of clothes in
next to the box.

John came up
beside me, and Mrs. Sunchana turned with us to look at what had
happened to her house. The explosion had knocked in the side of the
kitchen, and the roof had collapsed into the fire. Roof tiles curled
like leaves, and wooden spars jutted up through the mess. Charred
furniture stood against the far wall of the blackened living room. A
glittering chaos of shattered glass and china covered the tilted floor
of the living room. The heavy, deathlike stench of burned fabric and
wet ash came breathing out of the ruin.

"I hope we
can save the sections of the house left standing," said Mr. Sunchana.
He spoke with the same slight, lilting accent as his wife, but not as
idiomatically. "What is your opinion?"

"I'd better
explain myself," I said, and told them my name. "I left a note
yesterday, saying that I wanted to talk to you about your old landlord
on South Seventh Street, Bob Bandolier. I realize that this is a
terrible time for you, but I'd appreciate any time you can give me."

Mr. Sunchana
was shaking his head and walking away before I was halfway through this
little speech, but his wife stayed with me to the end. "How do you know
that we used to live in that house?"

"I talked to
Frank and Hannah Belknap."

"Theresa,"
said her husband. He was standing in front of the ruined porch and the
fire-blackened front door. He gestured at the rubble.

"I found your
note when we came home, but it was after ten, and I thought it might be
too late to call."

"I'd
appreciate any help you can give me," I said. "I realize it's an
imposition."

John was
leaning against the hood of the Pontiac, staring at the destruction.

"We have so
much to do," said her husband. "This is not important, talking about
that person."

"Yesterday,
someone followed me out here from Millhaven," I told her. "I just
caught a glimpse of him. When I read about your
house in the paper this morning, I wondered if the explosion was really
accidental."

"What do you
mean?" Mr. Sunchana came bristling back toward his wife and me. His
hair looked like a wire brush, and red veins threaded the whites of his
eyes. "Because you came here, someone did this terrible thing to us?
It's ridiculous. Who would do that?"

His wife did
not speak for a moment. Then she turned to her husband. "You said you
wanted to take a break."

"Sir," David
said, "we haven't seen or spoken to Mr. Bandolier in decades." He
pushed his fingers through his hair, making it stand up even more
stiffly.

His wife
focused on me again. "Why are you so interested in him?"

"Do you
remember the Blue Rose murders?" I asked. The irises snapped in her
black eyes. "I was looking for information that had to do with those
killings, and his name came up in connection with the St. Alwyn Hotel."

"You
are—what? A policeman? A private detective?"

"I'm a
writer," I said. "But this is a matter of personal interest to me. And
to my friend too." I introduced John, and he moved forward to nod hello
to the Sunchanas. They barely looked at him.

"Why is it
personally interesting to you?"

I couldn't
tell what was going on. Theresa and David Sunchana were both standing
in front of me now, David with a sort of weary nervousness that
suggested an unhappy foreknowledge of everything I was going to say to
him. His wife looked like a bird dog on point.

Maybe David
Sunchana knew what I was going to say, but I didn't. "A long time ago,
I wrote a novel about the Blue Rose murders," I said. David looked away
toward the house, and Theresa frowned. "I followed what I thought were
the basic facts of the case, so I made the detective the murderer. I
don't know if I ever really believed that, though. Then Mr. Ransom
called me about a week ago, after his wife was nearly murdered by
someone who wrote Blue Rose near her body."

"Ah," Theresa
said. "I am so sorry, Mr. Ransom. I saw it in the papers. But didn't
the Dragonette boy kill her?" She glanced at her husband, and his face
tightened.

I explained
about Walter Dragonette.

"We can't
help you," David said. Frowning, Theresa turned to him and then back to
me again. I still didn't know what was going on, but I knew that I had
to say more.

"I had a
private reason for trying to find out about the old Blue Rose
murderer," I said. "I think he was the person who killed my sister. She
was murdered five days before the first acknowledged victim, and in the
same place."

John opened
his mouth, then closed it, fast.

"There was a
little girl," Theresa said. "Remember, David?"

He nodded.

"April
Underhill," I said. "She was nine years old. I want to know who killed
her."

"David, the
little girl was his sister."

He muttered
something that sounded like German played backward.

"Is there
somewhere in Elm Hill where I could get you a cup of coffee?"

"There's a
coffee shop in the town center," she said.

"David?"

He glanced at
his watch, then dropped his hand and carefully, almost fearfully,
inspected my face. "We must be back in an hour to meet the men from the
company," he said. His wife touched his hand, and he gave her an almost
infinitesimal nod.

"I will put
my car in the garage," David said. "Theresa, will you please bring in
the good lamp?"

I moved
toward the lamp behind the Volvo, but he said, "Theresa will do it." He
got into the car. Theresa smiled at me and went to pick up the lamp. He
drove the station wagon into the wooden shell of the garage with
excruciating slowness. She followed him in, set the lamp down in a
corner, and went up beside the car. They whispered to one another
before he got out of the car. As they came toward me, Theresa's eyes
never left my face.

John opened
the back door of the Pontiac for them. Before they got in, David took a
white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the smudge from his wife's
chin.

As if by
arrangement, the Sunchanas did not mention either their former landlord
or the Blue Rose murders while we were in the car. Theresa described
how the policeman had miraculously walked into the smoke to carry them
out through the bedroom window. "That man saved our lives, really he
did, so David and I can't be too tragic about the house. Can we, David?"

She was their
public voice, and he assented. "Of course we cannot be tragic."

"Then we'll
live in a trailer while we build a new one. We'll put it on the front
lawn, like gypsies."

"They'll love
that, in Elm Hill," John said.

"Are you
staying in a hotel?" I asked.

"We're with
my sister. She and her husband moved to Elm Hill years before us—that's
why we came here. When we bought our house, it was the only one on the
street. There were fields all around us."

Other
questions drew out the information that they had moved to Millhaven
from Yugoslavia, where in the first days of their marriage they had
rented out rooms in their house to tourists while David had gone to
university. They had moved to America just before the war. David had
trained as an accountant and eventually got a job with the Glax
Corporation.

"The Glax
Corporation?" I remembered Theresa's saying "the Dragonette boy." On
our left, sunlight turned half the pond's surface to a still, rich
gold. Mallards floated in pairs on the gilded water. "You must have
known Walter Dragonette."

"He came to
my department a year before I retired," David said. I didn't want to
ask the question anyone with even a tenuous connection to a famous or
infamous person hears over and over. Neither did John. There was
silence in the car for a few seconds.

Theresa broke
it. "David was shaken when the news came out."

"Were you
fond of him?" I asked.

"I used to
think I was fond of Walter, once." He coughed. "He had the manner of a
courteous young man. But after three or four months, I began to think
that Walter was nonexistent. His body was there, he was polite, he got
his work done even though he sometimes came in late, but he was not
present
."

We drove past
the low, red town hall. Visible around a bend in the road, the bare
hill that gave the suburb its name raised itself into the sunlight.
Mica glittered and dazzled in the gray paths that crossed its deep
green.

"Don't you
think they suffer, people like that?" asked Theresa.

Her question
startled me with its echo of some barely conscious thought of my own.
As soon as she spoke, I knew I agreed with her—I believed in the
principle behind her words.

"No," her
husband said flatly. "He was not alive. If you're not
alive
, you do not
feel anything."

I moved my
head to see Theresa in the rearview mirror. She had turned toward her
husband, and her surprisingly sharp, clear profile stood out like a
profile on a coin. She moved her eyes to meet mine in the mirror. I
felt a shock of empathy.

"What do you
think, Mr. Underhill?"

I wrenched my
eyes away to check for traffic before turning into the parking lot of
the little shopping center. "We saw part of his interrogation," I said.
"He said that he had been sexually abused by a neighbor when he was a
small boy. So yes, I do think he suffered once."

"That is not
an excuse," David said.

"No," Theresa
sighed. "It is not an excuse."

I pulled into
a space, and David said something to her in the language they had
spoken in their garage. Whatever he said ended with the word Tresich. I
am spelling it the only way I can, phonetically. She had anglicized her
name for the sake of people like me and the Belknaps.

We got out of
the car.

John said,
"If that communication was too private to disclose, please tell me, but
I can't help but be curious about what you just said."

"It was—"
David stopped, and raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

"My husband
mentioned to me how awful it is, that we have known two murderers."
That same forceful compassion came out of her again, straight at me.
"When we lived upstairs from Mr. Bandolier, he killed his wife."

"We didn't
know what to do," Theresa said. Cups of coffee steamed on the pale wood
of the window table between us. She and I sat beside the window onto
the parking lot, David and John opposite each other. Two children
rolled down the long green hill across the street, spinning through the
grass with flying arms and legs. "We were so frightened of that man.
David is right. He was like a Nazi, a Nazi of the private life. And we
were so new in America that we thought he could put us in jail if we
went to the police. We lived in his house, we didn't know what rights
he had over us."

"Violent,"
David said. "Always shouting, always yelling."

"Now we would
know what to do," she said. "In those days, we didn't think anyone
would believe us."

"You have no
doubt that he killed his wife?"

David shook
his head emphatically, and Theresa said, "I wish we did." She picked up
her coffee and sipped it. "His wife was named Anna. She was a beautiful
woman, blond, always very quiet and shy. He didn't want her talking to
anyone. He didn't want people to know that he beat her." Her eyes met
mine again. "Especially on weekend nights, when he was drunk."